KomissarBojanchev wrote:I new my thread would slowly become a nationalistic wankfest

And for me it's a pitiful sight. Seeing that a filthy savage beast called "Fanboy" messed it.

For Mars however... well i think Russia should concentrate on the Moon first.. to gain experience on how space radiation beyond the Van Allen belt affect the space-man in long term because to get to mars.. a spacecraft may need a year..far longer flight time than Apollo.

KomissarBojanchev wrote:I new my thread would slowly become a nationalistic wankfest

And for me it's a pitiful sight. Seeing that a filthy savage beast called "Fanboy" messed it.

For Mars however... well i think Russia should concentrate on the Moon first.. to gain experience on how space radiation beyond the Van Allen belt affect the space-man in long term because to get to mars.. a spacecraft may need a year..far longer flight time than Apollo.

With all that nuclear engine technology spacecraft might only need to get to mars in a few months

KomissarBojanchev wrote:I new my thread would slowly become a nationalistic wankfest

And for me it's a pitiful sight. Seeing that a filthy savage beast called "Fanboy" messed it.

For Mars however... well i think Russia should concentrate on the Moon first.. to gain experience on how space radiation beyond the Van Allen belt affect the space-man in long term because to get to mars.. a spacecraft may need a year..far longer flight time than Apollo.

With all that nuclear engine technology spacecraft might only need to get to mars in a few months

I thought the whole upside of (theoretical) nuclear space propulsion was endurance, not speed.

The upside of nuclear propulsion is low thrust but continuous operation so a chemical rocket accelerates much faster but burns out in minutes and the rocket coasts the rest of the journey.

Nuclear propulsion should allow higher speeds and much shorter flight times on very long missions.

Very simply to go to Mars you can work it out by working backwards... you need to get a certain mass back to earth orbit... which might be 10 tons including food consumed on the way and the crew and the machines that process the air and make it all reusable plus the fuel to slow down to Earth orbit speeds. Added to that you need the amount of fuel needed to accelerate that mass from Mars orbit back to Earth. Add to that any fuel needed to get things off the Martian surface to martian orbit. Add to that the fuel needed to slow down all that mass to enter martian orbit and finally the amount of fuel needed to move all that mass and fuel from earth orbit to mars orbit.

Each time you burn fuel it is only for a few minutes at most and for the rest of the journey the rocket just coasts along... when you get near your destination you turn your rocket around and burn more fuel to slow down to enter orbit.

With Chemical rockets it is months at a time coasting with zero g all the way with all the problems that creates, with high g acceleration to start and to end the flight.

With a nuclear powered ion engine the speed gradually builds up over time with a very small gravity force... so everything gradually falls in one direction which is down... in a race the chemical rocket would blast out into a substantial lead while the ion engined rocket will accelerate constantly... eventually passing the chemical rocket and likely getting there several months ahead of it. The ion engine is never shut down as its low thrust means it needs to start slowing down the craft a long way from the destination to have time to have an effect too.

The main difference is that a chemical rocket will be thousands of kgs burned in minutes, while the fuel for an ion engine could be as little as 3-4kgs used up over a period of 2 years or more.

The key is that the speed of an object propelled by a rocket is directly related to the speed of the rocket exhaust and the exhaust of an ion engine is a large fraction of the speed of light... chemical rockets don't even come close.

A built in micro gravity is just an added bonus

_________________“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

I watched a science show on discovery channel I think and it said that some kind plasma propulsion technology will significantly fasten space travel. Was this show BSing me?

Ion engines use plasma, or superheated Xeon. Basically the plasma has free flowing electrons and can be controlled and directed by electric current... think of a particle accelerator with a ring of magnets with a line going in and a line coming out. Pump in ionised gas into the in line and use the magnets to keep the hot material off the walls of the ring and accelerate the material around and around till it is travelling at enormous speeds and then when it is going fast enough direct it down the line that leads out.

Using the smallest amounts of matter but accelerated to very very high speeds you can generate continuous thrust for months or even years to slowly accelerate to enormous speeds.

_________________“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

It seems like the space station atleast was working out in the 40's and 60's but now it seems like the talk of the day has moved from the moon to space exploration and planet discovery. Space exploration is underway, there have been many imaging and many have been going on inlcuding the russian (NOT AMERICAN) Hubble telescope. All this talk about the Red planet has got you mistaken. There has not been a race to the red planet, it has been NASA primarily that has been sending the space rovers to the moon, and unfortunately not the Russians or Chinese. I just wanted to outline a project I was involved with.

asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/mars/apxs.asp

Canadian research plays role in Mars explorationBy QMI Agency

A device developed in Ontario helped NASA scientists carry out the first full analysis of Martian soil.

The Mars Curiosity rover found water, sulphur and chlorine within scoops of soil this week — a discovery University of Guelph physics professor Ian Campbell calls "a significant technological and analytical achievement."

And it would not have been possible without an analytical device called the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS), built at the University of Guelph and mounted on the rover's arm.

The APXS measures the chemical elements within rock or soil.

It was built by an international group of scientists headed by U of G 's Ralf Gellert, and its daily operations and analysis are run by a U of G team right on campus.

Curiosity is the first Mars rover that can scoop up soil samples for internal analysis.

Guelph Physicists Ready for New Mars Rover Expedition

APXS operations centre to open on campus this fall

By Andrew VowlesFriday, July 22, 2011

A new Mars rover, complete with a U of G-tested instrument, is orbiting closer to the red planet this summer. To follow some of the action and learn more about Guelph’s ongoing connection to interplanetary exploration, check an eye-catching display in the MacNaughton Building lobby.

The display is just around the corner from a new U of G operations centre that will help lead the rover’s search for signs of past or present life on Mars. The Guelph facility will be the only Canadian operations centre – and one of only a few outside the United States – for the Curiosity rover mission set to begin on Mars in 2012.

“We are the ‘keepers’ of the APXS,” says Nick Boyd, research associate in the Department of Physics. That’s the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, an instrument mounted on the rover’s robotic arm to examine rocks and soil.

In 2008, that soup-can-sized device spent about three weeks at Guelph for testing by a team led by physics professor Ralf Gellert. It was then assembled on the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Earlier this summer, the rover was flown to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It will be launched in late November or early December, and will land on Mars in August 2012.

The vehicle, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), will spend about two years exploring Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. During the mission, Guelph’s operations centre will serve as a conduit between the rover, the JPL and numerous scientists worldwide, helping to guide the rover’s APXS explorations.

Says Boyd: “We will participate in defining the science objectives for any given day on Mars. If scientists require measurements by the instrument, that request will come to our team. We’ll assemble the command sequence to perform that measurement and send that to JPL to be integrated into the rover plan for the day. We will take part in web conferences and teleconferences and work with scientists at JPL.”

Boyd completed a physics degree at Guelph and is now a part-time master’s student in the School of Engineering.

Gellert is principal investigator for an international group of scientists who developed the instrument for the MSL mission. He was the lead scientist for APXS systems used on twin NASA rovers launched in 2003. Those earlier instruments detected evidence that water had been on Mars and that bound water still exists there.

Gellert’s lab still houses a clean room built to test the Curiosity-borne device in 2008. His team will keep a copy of the APXS there for testing and calibration during the actual mission.

Besides Boyd and Gellert, the operations centre group includes:

Mike Curry, major projects manager in the physics department and a former aerospace scientist, who has worked on instrumentation systems for the International Space Station; Will Klumpenhouwer, a third-year physics student who assembled the MacNaughton display and is completing a departmental website about the rover and its instrument; Glynis Perrett, a physics PhD student who helped to calibrate the APXS. She will study elements in Martian rock and soil, working with Iain Campbell, University professor emeritus.

Funding for the operations centre came from the Canadian Space Agency. An official opening will take place this fall.

Guelph’s connection to the pending mission is discussed in the MacNaughton display, which includes a slide show about Mars science and a rover’s-eye animation of the red planet.

About the size of a small car, Curiosity is about twice as long and five times as heavy as the earlier Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. It can roll over thigh-high obstacles and travel about the length of two football fields in a day.

So in conclusion, the Mars Rover built by the USA NASA department was a copy of the APXS rover built with the project I was involved with.

Each of the Mars Exploration Rovers which attracted worldwide attention for their exploits and discoveries in 2004/9 carries an Alpha-particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS).

The APXS contains a 244Cm source which excites X-ray emission in situ from Martian rock and soil samples, together with a small silicon drift detector which produces the X-ray spectra. There are two modes of excitation: the alpha particles from the 244Cm decay cause a variant of PIXE: and the L X-rays from the plutonium daughter cause X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Fortunately, this variant of PIXE has its greatest sensitivity for the lightest elements (Na - Ca) whereas XRF is best for the heavier elements (Ca - Zr). As a result, the APXS has excellent sensitivity all the way across the range of elements that occur in most minerals and rocks.

The Martian spectra have up till now been analyzed by Dr. Ralf Gellert (co-developer of the APXS) with fitting software developed at the Max Planck Institut in Mainz. We have now developed a variant of GUPIX to do this task, taking full advantage of the databases and procedures that have been tested and refined over many years. This new code GUAPX is now complete, and it has been used to re-calibrate the MER laboratory APXS, using a suite of spectra from simple chemical standards and from geological standard reference materials recorded much earlier by Dr. Gellert. Our results show excellent consistency for those standards that are perfectly homogeneous, and prove our assertion that the APXS can be described by a single instrumental constant (H-value). But they also reveal interesting new issues such as a dependence of the calibration on the actual rock type; for igneous rocks - basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we observe (Campbell et al., 2008) an influence of the mineral assemblage within the rock upon the calibration.

The most exciting outcome of the MER mission was perhaps the observation of large amounts of Cl, Br and S in the APXS spectra. These are thought to be from salts that were the residue of evaporation of large bodies of water in the past. This raises the question of whether the APXS spectra can provide any indication of bound water within the actual rocks being analyzed. Obviously the x-rays of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be detected, and so any approach has to be an indirect one. We have developed an approach as follows:

from the observed elemental x-rays, deduce the element concentrations convert these to oxide concentrations and normalize to 100% total; deduce from a Monte Carlo simulation the expected elastic/inelastic scatter ratio for the Pu L-alpha X-ray in a rock of this composition; compare the measured and simulated scatter ratios: if invisible matter such as water is present in the rock, they will disagree.

Such an approach has been used in the past to determine the presence or absence of light elements (although not on Mars!). A rigorous Monte Carlo simulation of elastic and inelastic scattering intensities has been developed by C.L. Mallett, J.M. O'Meara and J.L. Campbell to predict the R/C ratio, which is then compared to the value obtained by fitting the spectrum with GUAPX. This approach has been calibrated using measurements on recognized geochemical reference standards (see publications below). We find that Martian basaltic soils and rocks give results that agree very closely with our calibration, thus providing support for the method. However the bright high-sulfate subsurface "Paso Robles" soils churned up in several places by the Spirit rover's tires are in strong disagreement, and from this deviation we are able to derive their water content. This is the first in-situ measurement of mineralogically bound water on the Martian surface, and the results fit well with the reconstructed mineralogy.

In further development of GUAPX, we have used the fundamental parameters calibration described above to analyse the data from individual geo-standards, some of which were measured by Gellert but not included in his own calibration. We regard these individual geostandards as unknowns, and we have to use a fully iterative approach with GUAPX, in which all elements are converted to oxides and a 100% oxide total is enforced (the "closure rule") . By "tailoring" our calibration, i.e. by developing sub-calibrations for basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we are able to get excellent results for element concentrations in individual examples of these rock types, including, for example, the Zagami martian meteorite. In cases where the oxides do not sum to 100%, we are able to measure the bound water content: here the phyllo-silicate standard UB-N is a good example; our determination of 14% agrees well with the actual (CO2 +H2O) content of 11%. we have thus developed a second approach for measuring bound water, but it only works if the measurements of standards and unknowns are all done within a fixed geometry. On the MER mission, the geometry varied from sample to sample, and unfortunately there was no instrument attached to the APXS to provide the sample-detector distance; if that had been the case, this method could have given a direct measurement of water content.

We are now applying GUAPX to the calibration of the laboratory APXS for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

So the big news that confirms the whole mars conspiracy is

"The observation of large amounts of Cl, Br and S in the APXS spectra. These are thought to be from salts that were the residue of evaporation of large bodies of water in the past."

"From the observed elemental x-rays, deduce the element concentrationsConvert these to oxide concentrations and normalize to 100% total;Deduce from a Monte Carlo simulation the expected elastic/inelastic scatter ratio for the Pu L-alpha X-ray in a rock of this composition;Compare the measured and simulated scatter ratios: if invisible matter such as water is present in the rock, they will disagree."

"By "tailoring" our calibration, i.e. by developing sub-calibrations for basalts, andesites and rhyolites, we are able to get excellent results for element concentrations in individual examples of these rock types, including, for example, the Zagami martian meteorite. In cases where the oxides do not sum to 100%, we are able to measure the bound water content: here the phyllo-silicate standard UB-N is a good example; our determination of 14% agrees well with the actual (CO2 +H2O) content of 11%."

So the Whole Conspiracy About Life On Mars On The News Is...

"Canadas current MSL mission is assessing whether the Gale Crater offered a habitable environment for microbes. A critical part of the mission, the pop can-sized APXS measures which chemical elements — and how much of each type — are in rock or soil. The device has told us about changes in Martian geology and provided clues confirming, Mars, Epoch J2000, the planet’s suitability for life."

IMO Mars is definitelly much more resourceful than the Moon considering just their mass. Mars is also more like Earth than the Moon (and any other object in the solar system). Scientists talking about water possession under the surface of the Red planet insist the possibility that some basic lifeforms like bacterias might exist on Mars. If that would turn out to be true then Mars could become partially habitable in next hundreds years spantime. It is no way that a object of such mass like Mars could consist of just 'rusted metal' like someone wrote. Even asteroids have complicated structure, including frozen water!

Personally I think that in order to make trips to Mars more safely there should be a base on it's surface with it's own means of emergency return to the Earth. Scientists and rest of the crew should be self-sufficient on water and food supply. To thicken the atmosphere, increasing temperature on the Mars so the water supplies could flow out the surface - but that would be definitelly long term program. Short term program would preferably just consist of resourcing the planet off the rare materials. For the goods of the country's economics.

Personally I hope that Russia will come up with something more than just Nuclear Powered Rocket, but rather full-fledged Nuclear Powered Spaceship-Vessel that could be reused for 10-15 years. Making fleet of 3-4 of these they will definitelly be a leading-edge in the space industry. These ships just need to have enought capacity to transport big structures too.

The answer to this question is yes. US and Russia look like they will fight for whom will be #3Given the fact that we need at least 50-60 more years, at least, I find it very hard for the first two spots, but given the time needed anything may happen.

interesting topic, i have an idea, could be feasible with existing technology and not too much expencive . use proton to assemble a nuclear engine space tug in orbit.proton-m is 25t to LEOproton is then 50 mil per launch. launches:1- nuclear engines and other equipment.2-fuel for mission.3-tug habitation module with provisions.4- lander and ascent , its a single 2 stage vehicle.so that is 4 launches. 200 million.

dock them in a row: engines -fuel- lander and ascent vehicle- habitat. nuclear engine exaust could be vectored sideways and start to turn whole spaceship on axis to create gravity for habitat about 60% of earth can be enough since mars gravity is even lower.

tug could be used multiple times for mars missions ,and used as space station- in orbit around earth and mars waiting for humans.tug would be resuplied when returns to earth with few proton launches for fuel and food .

there is water on mars and carbon dioxide ... so fuel can be made on mars for ascent vehicle H2O+CO2 - methane CH4 and brethable oxygen.on another thought there would be needed 2-3 proton launches from earth for fuel depending on engine ISP and total weight.

even if more proton launches is needed lets say 2x more ,8 launches that still only 400 mil dollars., and habitat and fuel are not expencive. descent-ascent vehicle can cost more about 100 mil and nuclear engine, development costs not included since they are already researched, - would cost 100 mill.also i would keep minimal crew about 3 for first few trips anyway. geologist- biologist -and mechanic/ astronautical engineer.